1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to computer assisted search and retrieval systems and systems and methods for determining the types of users visiting a document collection or web site.
2. Description of Related Art
The ability to manage information is increasingly important in the modern information economy. As the reach of corporate information systems is extended to suppliers and customers, timely access to corporate information repositories becomes critical. Therefore, web site designers and information architects need to identify the types of users traversing their document collections or web sites. This information is then used to tailor the delivery of information based on the user's needs and the tasks the user must perform. A user's access patterns of a document collection and/or web site may be determined using conventional access information and/or special instrumentation of client access software. For example, Alexa Internet's Toolbar 5.0 system provides for a customized toolbar that is added to the client browser. Using the Toolbar 5.0 product, Alexa Internet is able to compile information regarding a user's path and makes suggestions of a next connection based on the similarity of the current path to accumulated historical browsing information. Similarly IBM's SurfAid product uses On-Line Analytical Processing methods to provide a user with counts of users following traversal paths. The system the attempts to assign each user path to a user path category. However, none of these conventional products provide for integration of the user's information needs as well as other modes of information. Also, none of these conventional systems employ multi-modal clustering to identify user types based on the multiple modes of information available. Instead, IBM's SurfAid Alexa Internet's product merely analyze the user paths directly.
Conventional software packages such as Accrue Corporation's Insight product and NetGenesis Corporation's NetGenesis 5 product provides tools for analyzing product purchases and click-through rates. However, these conventional software packages fail to identify user's tasks and user types and fail to integrate information from the various sources.